Running FATES with soil thickness

[jiamenglai]

Describe the changes

I tried to run FATES with soil thickness read from the surface data, however I met the error:

if ( use_var_soil_thick ) then
call endrun(msg=' ERROR: use_var_soil_thick and use_fates cannot both be set to true.'//&
errMsg(FILE, LINE))
end if

Then I tried the method proposed here #7319 by changing the ZSOI. It worked for site simulation. However, the variable ZSOI in the surfdata only has one dimension (nlevsoi), which means it cannot vary with spatial locations. I think it might be because that the soil depth in ELM code is defined as spatially constant. If I want to run regional simulations, how can we represent the spatially varying soil depth?

Is your request related to a problem?

No response

Alternative options

No response

Additional context

No response

[mpaiao]

@rgknox @glemieux Do you remember why ELM does not accept variable soil thickness together? It seems CTSM does not have such limitation. I wonder if this is a legacy code, or something we kept until someone decided to test it.

@jiamenglai as an option, maybe give it a try by commenting out this if block and see what happens. It may either work or explain why this barrier is in place...

[wwieder]

CLM does have this issue, but @glemieux has a PR that fixes the issue.

[glemieux]

@rgknox @glemieux Do you remember why ELM does not accept variable soil thickness together? It seems CTSM does not have such limitation. I wonder if this is a legacy code, or something we kept until someone decided to test it.

I'm not sure of the reason here. That particular logic is from about 5 years ago and I think is associated with a much older issue: E3SM-Project/E3SM#2159.